Sister Boniface Mysteries: "How to Murder a Tune" (Britbox, BBC, PBS, aired May 8, 2024)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Saturday, May 2) I watched the KPBS showings of episodes of two consecutive British crime series, Sister Boniface Mysteries and Father Brown. Father Brown began as a series of detective stories involving a Roman Catholic priest written by G. K. Chesterton from 1910 to 1936 (when Chesterton died), and apparently the character was based on a real-life priest, Right Rev. Monsignor John O’Connor of Bradford, West Yorkshire, England, who was instrumental in converting Chesterton from the Church of England to Roman Catholicism. Sister Boniface Mysteries was in turn an offshoot of the long-running Father Brown TV series in which the title character was not only a nun but one with a greater understanding of forensic medicine than anyone else in England (or at least in her fictional central England community, “Great Slaughter”), including anyone connected with official law enforcement. Sister Boniface Mysteries is set in the 1960’s and this particular episode, originally aired on May 8, 2024, was called “How to Murder a Tune.” Written by Lisa McMullin and directed by Diana Patrick, it was built around a fictional TV series called Glory Be that was about contests for various church choir soloists. The winner would get a scholarship and national exposure for a potential singing career in either sacred or secular music. The contest was originally thought up by Barry Gold (Jason Pennybrooke), an African-British man, but eventually Donald Merriweather (Michael Spicer) aced Gold out of control of the contest. Merriweather is portrayed as so much of an asshole with a lot of people enraged at his no-holds-barred efforts to get what he wants, including a long-term sexual relationship with Marion Kane (Victoria Broom), for whom he’s rigged the contest so she will win, that it’s not at all surprising that he was the murder victim. He collapses at the organ keyboard of the convent while rehearsing the show, and it turns out he was killed by cyanide but, since he neither ate nor drank anything prior to his sudden death, it’s a mystery how the poison was administered to him. Needless to say, Sister Boniface (Lorna Watson) figures it out.

The cyanide was from the sheet music he was playing from, each page had been soaked in a solution containing it, and whenever Merriweather moistened his fingers to turn a page in the score, the residue collected on them and transferred itself to his body when he licked his fingers to turn the pages again. (It’s not that different from the death of the legendary real-life French organist and composer Louis Vierne, who was the regular organist at Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris until June 2, 1937, when at the end of his 1,750th recital on the great organ he was scheduled to play two improvisations on submitted themes; he opened the envelope containing one of them, selected the registrations he would use, and then had a heart attack and died while his hands and feet still rested on the organ, producing a low note E from his foot on the pedal. But at least Vierne was not deliberately poisoned.) The killer turns out to be [spoiler alert!] Oliver Potts (Tristan Whincup), whose mother was a lover of Donald Merriweather when they were both attending the same music college, until she decided to leave him. Merriweather’s revenge was to frame her for allegedly cheating on the school-wide exams by stealing the answers in advance. In reality, he stole the answers himself and planted them on her, but this ruined her reputation, she never recovered from it, and ultimately committed suicide over her ongoing shame. We also get a hint, though writer McMullin keeps it from becoming more than a hint, that Donald Merriweather is the young man’s father. There’s a moment of pathos as the official police arrest Oliver, whose boy-band rock-star good looks are impressive in and of themselves, and tell him that by killing Merriweather he’s ruined his own life – and he solemnly tells them that it’s worth it because at least Merriweather’s death means he can’t ruin anybody else’s lives. There are also a couple of amusing subplots, including Marion’s decision after the contest (which she wins because Oliver’s arrest has eliminated her principal competitor) to devote herself to God and sing only sacred music from now on; and the rehearsals for the nuns’ choir, which go terribly until they decide to let their hair down, rehearse at a local pub, and sing “Knees Up, Mother Brown” and other similarly ribald material. The gag is they sound terrible when singing hymns but great at the profane (in both senses) songs. I also liked the way the show kept shifting from color to black-and-white and back, reflecting whether the scenes were real or part of the Glory Be telecast, after I remembered that in the 1960’s British TV had not yet adopted color.